Frederick Douglass
E. Napp
“I have observed this in my
experience of slavery, that
whenever my condition was
improved, instead of
increasing my contentment, it
only increased my desire to
be free, and set me to
thinking of plans to gain my
freedom. I have found that, to
make a contented slave, it is
necessary to make a
thoughtless one.”
Of all the commercial ties that linked the early
modern world, none had more profound human
consequences than the Atlantic slave trade
 During the 400 years from the mid-fifteenth to
the mid-nineteenth century, that trade in
humankind took an estimated 11 million people
from African societies
 Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in the
Middle Passage and deposited in the Americas,
where they were subjected to forced labor,
beatings and brandings
 Millions more died in the process of capture and
transport before ever reaching American shores
 The Atlantic slave trade transformed the
societies of all of its participants

E. Napp
E. Napp
Within Africa, some societies were thoroughly
disrupted; others were strengthened; many were
corrupted. Elites were enriched while slaves
were victimized. In the Americas, the slave trade
added a substantial African presence to the mix
of European and Native American peoples.
An African diaspora (the transatlantic spread of
African peoples) injected into new societies issues
of race that still endure today
 Elements of African culture, such as religious
ideas, musical and artistic traditions, and
cuisine, were introduced into American cultures
 The profits from the slave trade and the forced
labor of African slaves enriched European and
Euro-American societies
 The Atlantic slave trade was stimulated by the
plantation complex of the Americas and the
deaths of many Native American Indians
 But the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the
Americas was a large-scale expression of an
almost universal human practice – the owning
and exchange of human beings

E. Napp
E. Napp
With origins that go back to early civilizations,
slavery was widely accepted and was closely
linked to warfare and capture. Before 1500, the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean basins were
the major arenas of the Old World slave trade,
and southern Russia was a major source of
slaves. Many African societies likewise practiced
slavery and sold slaves into international
commercial networks. A trans-Saharan slave
trade funneled African captives into
Mediterranean slavery and an East African slave
trade brought Africans into the Middle East and
Indian Ocean basin within the Islamic world.
Slavery came in many forms
 In some places, children inherited the slave
status of parents; elsewhere children were free
persons
 Within the Islamic world, the preference was for
female slaves by a two-to-one margin, while the
later Atlantic slave trade favored males by a
similar margin
 Some slaves in the Islamic world acquired
prominent military or political status
 But slavery in the Americas was distinctive in
several ways
 One way was the immense size of the traffic in
slaves and its centrality to the economies of
colonial America

E. Napp
E. Napp
New World slavery was based on plantation
agriculture and slaves were treated as
dehumanized property, lacking any rights. Slave
status was inherited across generations with
little hope of freedom for the vast majority.
Nowhere else, with the possible exception of
ancient Greece, was widespread slavery
associated with societies affirming values of
human freedom and equality. But the most
distinctive difference was the racial dimension.
Atlantic slavery came to be identified wholly with
Africa and with “blackness”
 The origins of Atlantic slavery lie in the
Mediterranean world and a demand for sugar
 Until the Crusades, Europeans knew nothing of
sugar and relied on sweeteners like honey or fruit
 They learned about sugarcane from the Arabs
and the laborious techniques for producing sugar
 Europeans established sugar-producing
plantations within the Mediterranean and later
on various islands off the West African coast
 Sugar production was perhaps the first “modern”
industry requiring huge capital investment,
substantial technology, a factory-like discipline
among workers, and a mass market of consumers

E. Napp
The difficulty and danger of the work, the
limitations attached to serf labor, and the general
absence of wage workers all pointed to slavery as
a source of labor for sugar plantations.
E. Napp
Initially, Slavic-speaking peoples from the Black
Sea region furnished the bulk of the slaves for
Mediterranean plantations, so much so that
“Slav” became the basis for the word “slave” in
many European languages.
 But in 1453, the Ottoman Turks seized
Constantinople and the supply of Slavic slaves
was effectively cut off
 At the same time, Portuguese mariners were
exploring the coast of West Africa looking for gold
but finding an alternative source of slaves
available for sale
 When sugar and later tobacco and cotton
plantations took hold in the Americas, Europeans
had already established links to a West African
source of supply

E. Napp
E. Napp
Africa became the primary source of slave labor
for the plantation economies of the Americas
since Slavic peoples were no longer available and
Native Americans quickly perished from
European diseases while marginal Europeans
were Christians and supposedly exempt from
slavery and European indentured servants were
expensive and temporary.
Africans were skilled farmers and had some
immunity to both tropical and European diseases
and were not Christians
 And Africans were readily available in
substantial numbers through African-operated
commercial networks
 Slavery and racism soon went hand in hand
 The European demand for slaves was the chief
cause of the Atlantic slave trade and the trade
was in the hands of Europeans from the point of
sale on the African coast to the use of slave labor
on plantations in the Americas
 But within Africa, Africans supplied African
slaves to European traders

E. Napp
E. Napp
Europeans often died when they entered the
African interior because they lacked immunities
to tropical diseases. The slave trade quickly
came to operate largely with Europeans waiting
on the coast in ships or fortified settlements to
purchase slaves from African merchants and
political elites. Europeans tried to exploit
African rivalries to obtain slaves at the lowest
cost and European firearms increased warfare
but from the point of initial capture to sale on the
coast, the slave trade was in African hands.
Europeans generally dealt as equals with local
African authorities
 Europeans purchased slaves with Indian textiles,
cowrie shells (used as money in West Africa),
European metal goods, firearms and gunpowder,
tobacco and alcohol, and various decorative items
such as beads
 Europeans purchased some of these items –
cowrie shells and Indian textiles with silver
mined in the Americas
 The slave trade connected with commerce in
silver and textiles as it became part of an
emerging worldwide network of exchange
 But while some Africans controlled the supply of
slaves, others were overwhelmed by it

E. Napp
E. Napp
Many small-scale kinship-based societies, lacking
the protection of a strong state, were thoroughly
disrupted by raids from more powerful neighbors.
Even some sizable states were destabilized. In
the early sixteenth century, the kingdom of
Kongo, located mostly in present-day Angola, had
been badly damaged by the commerce in slaves,
and the authority of its rulers had been severely
undermined. In 1526, the Kongo king Alfonso, a
convert to Christianity, begged the Portuguese to
halt the slave trade.
For the captured slaves – who were seized in the
interior and often sold several times on the
harrowing journey to the coast, sometimes
branded, and held in squalid slave dungeons
while awaiting transportation to the New World
– the slave trade was anything but a commercial
transaction
 From 1450-1600, fewer than 4,000 slaves were
annually shipped to Europe or across the Atlantic
 The Portuguese were equally interested in
African gold, spices, and textiles
 As in Asia, the Portuguese became involved in
transporting African goods, including slaves,
from one African port to another
 In the seventeenth century, about 10,000 slaves
per year were shipped to the Americas

E. Napp
E. Napp
By this time, the slave trade was becoming highly
competitive, with the British, Dutch, and English
contesting the earlier Portuguese monopoly. The
eighteenth century was the high point of the
slave trade as the plantation economies of the
Americas boomed. By the 1750s, more than
60,000 people per year left Africa in chains,
bound for the Americas and slavery.
Geographically, the slave trade drew on the
societies of West Africa, from present-day
Mauritania in the north to Angola in the south
 Initially focused on the coastal regions, the slave
trade progressively penetrated into the interior
as the demand for slaves picked up
 Socially, most slaves were drawn from marginal
groups – prisoners of war, criminals, debtors,
people who had been “pawned” during times of
difficulty
 Africans did not generally sell members of their
own communities into slavery
 Divided into hundreds of separate, usually smallscale, and often rival communities, the various
people of West Africa had no concept of an
“African” identity

E. Napp
Those whom they captured and sold were
normally outsiders, vulnerable people who lacked
the protection of membership in an established
community.
E. Napp
Some 80 percent of African slaves wound up in
Brazil or the Caribbean, where the labor
demands of the plantation economy were the
most intense
 About 5 to 6 percent found themselves in North
America, with the balance in mainland Spanish
America or in Europe itself
 The journey across the Atlantic was horrendous
almost beyond description, with the Middle
Passage having an overall mortality rate of 15
percent
 An outcome of the slave trade lay in the new
transregional linkages it generated
 Africa became a permanent part of an interacting
Atlantic world

E. Napp
E. Napp
West African economies were increasingly
connected to an emerging European-centered
world economy. Although the slave trade did not
result in the kind of population collapse that
occurred in the Americas, it slowed Africa’s
growth at a time when Europe, China, and other
regions were expanding demographically.
Scholars have estimated that sub-Saharan Africa
represented about 18 percent of the world’s
population in 1600, but only 6 percent in 1900.
The population decrease derived not only from
the loss of millions of people over four centuries
but also from the economic stagnation and
political disruption that the slave trade
generated
 Economically, the slave trade stimulated little
positive change in Africa because those Africans
who benefited most from the traffic in people
were not investing in the productive capacities of
African societies
 Maize and manioc (cassava), introduced from the
Americas, added a new source of calories in
African diets, but the international demand was
for Africa’s people, not its agricultural products
 Within Africa, the impact of the slave trade
differed considerably from place to place

E. Napp
E. Napp
In small-scale societies that were frequently
subjected to slave raiding and that had little
centralized authority, insecurity was pervasive.
Some large kingdoms such as Kongo and Oyo
slowly disintegrated as access to trading
opportunities and firearms enabled outlying
regions to establish their independence. Yet
some African authorities also sought to take
advantage of the new commercial opportunities
and to manage the slave trade in their own
interests.
The kingdom of Benin, in the forest area of
present-day Nigeria, was one of the oldest and
most highly developed states in the coastal
hinterland of West Africa, dating back perhaps to
the eleventh century CE
 Its capital was a large, walled city with a
powerful monarch or oba
 Benin’s monarch strictly controlled the country’s
trade
 Benin was able to avoid a deep involvement in
the slave trade and to diversify the exports with
which it purchased European firearms and other
goods
 As early as 1516, the oba began to restrict the
slave trade and soon forbade the export of male
slaves altogether, a ban that lasted until the
early eighteenth century

E. Napp
E. Napp
By then, the oba’s authority over outlying areas
had declined, and the country’s major exports of
pepper and cotton cloth had lost out to Asian and
then European competition. Under these
circumstances, Benin felt compelled to resume
limited participation in the slave trade. But even
at the height of the trade, in the late eighteenth
century, Benin exported fewer than 1,000 slaves
a year.
Among the Aja-speaking peoples to the west of
Benin, the situation was very different
 There the slave trade thoroughly disrupted a
series of small and weak states along the coast
 Some distance inland, the kingdom of Dahomey
arose in the early eighteenth century, in part as
an effort to contain the constant raiding and
havoc occasioned by the coastal trade
 It was a unique and highly authoritarian state in
which commoners and chiefs alike were
responsible directly to the king and in which the
power of lineages and secret societies were
considerably weakened
 For a time, Dahomey tried to limit the external
slave trade

E. Napp
Dahomey tried to limit the external slave trade, to
import European craftsmen, and to develop
plantation agriculture within the kingdom, but
all of this failed.
E. Napp
In view of hostile relations with the neighboring
kingdom of Oyo and others, Dahomey instead
turned to a vigorous involvement in the slave
trade, under strict royal control
 The army conducted annual slave raids
 The government soon came to depend on the
trade for its essential revenues
 Unlike in Benin, the slave trade in Dahomey
became the chief business of the state and
remained so until well into the nineteenth
century

E. Napp
E. Napp
The dawning of a genuinely global economy in the
early modern era was tied to empire building and
to slavery, both of which had been discredited by
the late twentieth century. Slavery lost its
legitimacy during the nineteenth century, and
formal territorial empires largely disappeared in
the twentieth.
STRAYER QUESTIONS
What was distinctive about the Atlantic slave
trade? What did it share with other patterns of
slave owning and slave trading?
 What explains the rise of the Atlantic slave
trade?
 What roles did Europeans and Africans play in
the unfolding Atlantic slave trade?
 In what different ways did the Atlantic slave
trade transform African societies?

E. Napp